Liberty of
conscience used to be something that every Baptist held dear.We cherished it because it was
denied to us for so long. For early Baptists conscience was
something sacred and inviolable. They refused to give anyone the liberty to
judge another person’s conscience – not even the conscience of a Jew or a Turk
(their name for a Muslim) or an atheist.

In the
beginning of the Baptist movement, every Baptist felt the blow to personal
integrity that came when someone tried to force them to affirm allegiance to
another man’s creed. Most of them had first-hand experience with the assault to
conscience that came from being taxed to support the faiths of their oppressors.

At
great personal sacrifice those Baptists refused to pay taxes to support state
churches. Isaac Backus said,

"it implies an acknowledgement that the civil
power has a right to set one religious sect up above another . . . [and it]
emboldens people to judge the liberty of other men’s consciences."[1]

No one described the
price that our Baptist forefathers paid to secure our liberty of conscience more
succinctly or more eloquently than John Leland. In a letter to George
Washington, written on behalf of Virginia Baptists, Leland explained why
Baptists refused to ratify the Constitution until the First Amendment was
added. He wrote:

"When the Constitution first made its
appearance in Virginia, we, as a society, had unusual strugglings of mind,
fearing that the liberty of conscience, dearer to us than property or life, was
not sufficiently secured. Perhaps our jealousies were heightened by the usage we
received in Virginia under regal government, when mobs, fines, bonds and prisons
were our frequent repast."[2]

"Liberty of
conscience, dearer to us than property or life" and opposition to judging
"the liberty of other men’s consciences" -- those were convictions that used
to distinguish Baptists from other Christians. Whatever happened to those
convictions?

Whatever became of liberty of conscience?

Does anyone
today hear the voices of those early Baptists?

From the mists
of time I imagine that Isaac Backus would like to speak to us. He asks,

“Can it be true that 21st century
Baptists choose leaders who arrogate authority over both church and state and
who take the liberty to judge the consciences of others? Say it’s not so.”

But it is so.

Now John Leland
has a question. He asks,

“After 18th century Baptists
endured fines, beatings, imprisonments and had our property confiscated because
we refused to pay taxes to support the hireling clergy that denied us liberty of
conscience – how can 21st century Baptists willingly pay tithes to
clerics who are devoted to negating liberty of conscience in the church and in
civil society? Say it’s not so.”

But it is so.
And that’s just the beginning.

Lottie Moon and
Annie Armstrong ask,

“What happened to the Baptists who looked for
Jesus in the eye of everyone they faced? We hear that 21st century
Baptists look for sin in the face of everyone they eye? Say it’s not so.”

But it is so.
And that’s not all.

A whole chorus
of Baptists, led by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams, backed up
by generations of Baptists all the way to E.Y. Mullins and George Truett and R.G.
Lee and Herschel Hobbs -- and with one voice they are all asking,

“Can it be true that some 21st
century Baptists deride appeals to liberty of conscience as evidence of an
unorthodox faith and proof of ‘liberalism?’ Say it’s not so.”

But it is so.
And we all know it.

In the last two
years alone Southern Baptists have:

·fired scores of missionaries
for refusing to sign an idolatrous and unconscionable creed,

·we’ve sparked riots in
countries around the world with our finger pointing pronouncements and
inflammatory rhetoric about Islam and its founder,

·we’ve assumed the role as chief
priests in a neo-conservative political crusade to assert American supremacy and
force American values on the rest of the world,

·and now we are
withdrawing from the Baptist World Alliance because of a supposed “leftward
drift” and “A
decided anti-American tone.”

All
of these things have happened in full public view and under the eyes of the
people who fill Baptist pews. But Baptists don’t seem to care. Why is there no
outcry in our churches? Why do Baptists dutifully fill the coffers of the
Southern Baptist Convention Sunday morning after Sunday morning and thereby
underwrite, endorse and perpetuate such evils?

I
have an answer that may surprise you. I think most Baptists support the SBC out
of a sense of gratitude. We are grateful to the SBC for relieving us of the
liberty and responsibility for making conscientious choices.

Freedom is a burden. Liberty of conscience means you must accept the
responsibility to make conscientious choices. Better than anyone else, the
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky understood the depth of that burden. In his
novel about The Brothers Karamazov he told a parable about the “Grand
Inquisitor.” In Dostoevsky’s story, the Inquisitor observes
the risen Christ raising a
little girl from the dead and has him arrested. Then the Inquisitor
interrogates Christ and condemns him for the crime of making men free. Christ
was silent throughout the interrogation, but the Inquisitor, like some
Fundamentalists we know, already had the answers to all his questions.

The Inquisitor said to
Christ

“For fifteen centuries we
have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. . .
. today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet
they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.”

He added

“nothing has ever been more
insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. . . . Man prefers
peace, and even death to freedom of choice . . . Nothing is more seductive for
man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of
suffering.”

Finally, the Inquisitor advised Christ that his work had to be corrected and
founded upon miracle, mystery and authority. He said when they did that,

“men rejoiced that they
were again led like sheep, and the terrible gift [of liberty of conscience] that
had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts.”

Baptists are indeed being led like sheep and the burden of liberty of conscience
has been lifted from their hearts. As I see it, it is the task of Mainstream
Baptists to put it back on their hearts.

There are two
burdens that need to be placed squarely back on the hearts of Baptists. One has
to do with stewardship and the other has to do with being consistent and not
hypocritical in applying the Golden Rule.

The
choices that modern Baptists find most burdensome are associated with
stewardship. Baptists have been trained to take their tithes and offerings to
the storehouse and they think the Southern Baptist Convention is God’s
storehouse. When Baptists take their tithes to the storehouse, in their minds,
they mistakenly think their accountability has ended and that the responsibility
to see that their money is spent wisely has been shifted to God or to others.

It is
time to tell Baptists that the days of storehouse tithing are over. The
Southern Baptist Convention is not God’s temple, and though Morris Chapmanmay think he is
-- he is not God’s high priest, and though the
executive committee of the Southern Baptist Conventionmay act like it is --
it is not the Sanhedrin.
All such hierarchical mediating systems ended when Jesus came. The only
mediator between God and man is the man Christ Jesus. We are all personally
accountable to him. Every Baptist is personally accountable for the stewardship
of his or her own resources and responsible to God for how all of their time and
talent and treasure gets spent. Individual Southern Baptists cannot evade the
accounting they must give to God for how they let their denomination uses their
tithes and offerings.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for conscientious stewardship. If the people asking
for money don’t respect liberty of conscience, they don’t deserve your support.
Find organizations that do support liberty of conscience and send your money to
them. The SBC should be supported in proportion to the degree that its
leadership extends liberty of conscience to its journalists, missionaries,
professors, and employees. Right now, that would amount to absolutely nothing.

That
brings me to the second burden that Baptists need to accept. More is at stake
than a support system for missionaries. The money sustaining the SBC is eroding
the common ground on which all present and future mission work depends.

Conscience is the
sacred ground in the human soul where we listen for the voice of God and respond
to it. Liberty of conscience is sacred and inviolable because it is the
necessary pre-requisite for people to hear the gospel and
receive it.
We are not born into the kingdom of God. Salvation is not our
birthright and it is not something we earn or deserve. Real faith does not come
by coercion. God extends grace to us freely and it must be received freely. To
be free to receive it means that we must also be free to reject it. That is why
real Baptists have always coupled liberty of conscience with a consistent and
non-hypocritical application of the Golden Rule.

The early
Baptists were consistent about wanting to see liberty of conscience extended to
everybody – to people of all faiths and to people of no faith. They took
liberty of conscience seriously and the Golden Rule literally. They willing did
what Jesus commanded when he said, “Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you.” For them, the Golden Rule was a principle of respect for the
liberty of conscience of other persons. It also provided the common ground on
which people of divergent beliefs and convictions could live together in peace
and unity – if they desire to do so. Unfortunately, not everyone desires to do
so. Fundamentalism in the SBC, like Fundamentalism in every religion, restricts
the Golden Rule and compresses the circle of people that are treated with
respect. That always leads to violence.

The cycle of
violence in Baptist circles began in 1979 when some Fundamentalists began waging
a holy war against moderates within the Baptist family. In the beginning the
Fundamentalists waged war with slanderous verbal assaults and paper ballots.
Most Baptist lay people thought they could stop up their ears to this violence
and it would go away. But, it didn’t go away. Once the Fundamentalists gained
power their assaults took the form of committee recommendations and their weapon
of choice became pink slips. This time, Baptist lay people closed their eyes to
the violence and thought it would all go away. Their eyes are still closed. If
they would open their eyes, they would see that all but a few moderates did
go away, but that still didn’t put an end to the violence. Now Baptist
Fundamentalists are waging a holy war against Muslims and Hindus and Humanists
and Homosexuals. Already, the weapons of war are shifting from ballots and pink
slips to bullets. Now people are literally dying. No matter how tightly
Southern Baptists close their eyes and stop their ears, the violence of
Fundamentalism is not going to go away. It will not go away until Baptists open
their eyes, take their hands off their ears and start doing something to put an
end to the barrage of insults that their leaders are using to promote culture
wars at home and to fuel violent clashes between civilizations abroad.

Southern
Baptists have sown to the Fundamentalist wind and twenty-five years later the
whole world is reaping the whirlwind. Today Southern Baptists pose a threat not
only to liberty of conscience and religious liberty, but to world peace. In
Oklahoma at least one prominent Southern Baptist leader has recruited other
Baptists and solicited funds from them for a loosely organized group of
revolutionary white supremacists known as “posse commitatus.” Nationally,
prominent Southern Baptist leaders work closely with the leaders of a movement
that believes democracy is heresy and wants to set up a Fundamentalist Christian
theocracy in America. Internationally, prominent Southern Baptist leaders work
closely with Christian Zionists whose political influence and Armageddon
theology has become a major impediment to finding a peaceful solution to
conflict in Israel and the Middle East. Southern Baptists are increasingly
playing a major role in a cycle of escalating violence that could literally lead
to the nuclear incineration of the very people to whom we once felt called to
share the good news about God’s love and redemption.

Why can’t
Southern Baptists see the stain of blood of martyred missionaries that is on
their hands? When will Baptists listen to the voices of their own missionaries
crying out from under heaven’s altar?

Like all the martyr voices under heaven’s
altar they ask one question, “How long?”

·How long must God’s servants
live in fear of assassination by the Fundamentalists of other faiths and, at the
same time, face witch hunts from Fundamentalists within their own faith?

·How long will Baptists let
people like Jerry Vines and Paige Patterson and Jerry Falwell represent them
before the world?

·How long will Baptists continue
to fund rhetoric that incites hatred against Christians and creates stumbling
blocks to the reception of the gospel?

There is little
hope that Baptist’s role in this cycle of violence will end unless Baptists
return to their roots and once again become champions of liberty of
conscience.

·Should we do that, there is
still hope that Baptists can live in peace with each other and with people of
different convictions.

·Should we do that, there is
still hope that a common ground of respect for persons of other faiths could
secure a peaceful forum where we can share the gospel.

If we fail to
do that, we will all be condemned to share in the plagues of perpetually
escalating violence and injustice that our own Fundamentalists are helping to
bring upon the world.

God
help us!

God
help us to get Baptists to stand up and face the scourge of Fundamentalism
before it completely destroys the peace not only of our denomination and of the
Baptist World Alliance, but of the very world that you gave your son to redeem.